My Strange Addiction

The sleazy wisdom of “Big Brother.”

“Big Brother” is in its fourteenth season, and former fans are now contestants.Credit Illustration by Aesthetic Apparatus

It would be neglectful for this critic to write about the CBS reality series “Big Brother,” now in its fourteenth season, without making a troubling confession: twelve years ago, I was a Web watcher. This means that I didn’t merely watch “Big Brother” episodes many nights a week—an embarrassing enough revelation—but also online, via 24/7 streaming footage. Each morning, I would stumble into my living room and open my laptop, letting the characters (who were in California, three hours behind) sleep on the screen, like pets. In my defense, I was freelancing at the time. I needed the company.

This might not have been such strange behavior if “Big Brother” had been a water-cooler hit. But it was a flop: the Dutch-created game show, in which contestants spent months in isolation, was a phenomenon in Europe, but its first American season was swamped by “Survivor,” a ratings bonanza and the subject of outraged op-eds. “Survivor” starred jocks and was filmed in exotic locations. “Big Brother” starred “hamsters” in sweatpants, caged in a house, forced to memorize highway routes to win treats.

Even worse, the American audience had no idea how to vote. In other countries, the viewers threw out the boring people, leaving those with mood disorders and/or sex appeal. Americans did the opposite: they expelled the troublemakers, who were, early in Season 1, a black nationalist and a bisexual stripper. As a result, the cast members became paralyzed, convinced that they’d be booted if they did anything interesting. One night, I watched enraptured as my favorite character, an introverted Asian-American lawyer named Curtis, brooded over his impending expulsion, then chatted politely with his competitor—it was a subtle emotional heroism that was hardly telegenic. Later, a Midwestern roofer nicknamed Chicken George tried to persuade the cast to stage a mass walkout; you’ll have to take my word for this, but those hours of filibustering were amazing to watch live. By then the show’s audience was tiny, even counting my fellow Web watchers, with whom I spent hours online analyzing these important events.

Understandably, the producers changed the rules in Season 2. Now the “Big Brother” contestants voted one another off. Alliances formed, including a cruel clique called Chilltown. The Chilltown schemers believed that they were the show’s heroes, not its villains—and they were also, in the unedited feeds, hilariously obsessed with ratings, fomenting half-real “showmances” and strutting like roosters. The Nielsen levels spiked, but I was getting too uneasy to keep watching. (O.K., I watched Season 3—but that was it, I swear.)

For fans, the early seasons of reality TV were fuelled by cognitive dissonance: the aesthetics might be ugly and the ethics dubious, but the conversations among viewers went amazingly deep, into psychology, politics, and the nature of human intimacy—talk that was more resonant than anything triggered by the polite scripted dramas that surrounded them. This never quite justified the cruelty, so I turned away. But apparently the cookies in my Web browser’s cache were baked by Proust, because twelve years later, when I reopened the feeds, all the old giddiness flooded back. Ooh, there was the miserable house! The hideous “veto” medal! There was the robotic host, Julie Chen, and the dumb competitions, with contestants jumping on spinning beds like toddlers on bath salts. Naturally, I got addicted right away.

Part of the fun of watching the later seasons of a half-demonic, half-fantastic series like “Big Brother” is that the contestants are themselves fans of the show—in this season’s première, one hamster tells another that he saw him on TV when he was ten years old. Four characters are past contestants, including Mike Boogie, the cretinous wingman of Chilltown, now the series’ professor emeritus with highlights in his hair. A newbie arrives self-branded, announcing, “I look like your typical Southern gay. But underneath it I’m tough, I’m talented, and I’m gonna kick your booty.” The show may have lost its innocence—and the drama of having at least one character who is there to make friends—but I no longer worry about the cast. To quote the movie “Airplane,” “They bought their tickets. They knew what they were getting into. I say, let ’em crash.”

The current crew includes a tattooed Puerto Rican punk-rock lesbian, a spray-tan technician who plans to fill the house with “great energy,” a pasty-white science geek, a chef who speaks in a shout, a hot nurse who mysteriously pretends to be a hot kindergarten teacher, a few other hard-to-distinguish hot girls, and a carpenter who inspires lame “good with his hands” jokes, but who is hot. Diversity has always been a mixed blessing of the reality genre, which is one of the few opportunities on network television for working-class people to appear as themselves—as caricatures on the worst shows, but with brass and nuance on the best.

“Big Brother” is not one of the best. It’s also far less diverse than it was in its early years (and not only racially: in Season 1, fewer of the characters were Hollywood wannabes). But, over time, with cameras beating down on them, even the most bogus contestants can radiate charisma, learning to fake it so real they are beyond fake, to quote Courtney Love, who would make a great hamster. The live feeds remain inexplicably hypnotic. In one, the tattooed punk frets about her enemies, while out at the pool three women languidly exchange pregnancy stories, then discuss Jeannette Walls’s memoir “The Glass Castle.” People talk about lunch a lot, but there are flashes of intimacy and cunning.

So far, this season has been dominated by Mike Boogie and his mop-top mentee, Frank. But the characters who stand out are Ian and Ashley, the “nerd” and the “ditz.” It’s obvious that these two are being groomed by the producers; they’re even sent on a date, with Ian dressed in Pee-wee Hermanesque drag. (Apparently, staffers on “Big Brother” picked up a viewer’s tweet noting parallels to the network’s sitcom “The Big Bang Theory.”) In this clouded atmosphere, the fun is in discerning what’s counterfeit: Is Ashley a dope, or dopey like a fox? Is the seemingly naïve Ian in fact the ultimate manipulator? On the edited show, you’ll never hear what you do on the feeds, such as the sinister voice of the producers over the loudspeakers: “Please! Do not talk about production.”

Back in 2000, it seemed clear what reality TV was: the slutty, embarrassing cousin of cinéma vérité. Documentary bred with soap opera, the genre was considered a grave threat to scripted television. Instead, the two styles have moved forward together, in an aesthetic three-legged race. Reality is no longer just one thing, to be responded to in just one way: You’ve got your joyous singing contests and your wrenching dives into addiction. You’ve got shows about fashion and cooking, makeovers and dating, home renovation and weight loss—a women’s magazine brought to life. You’ve got subcultural soaps like “Polyamory: Married & Dating,” misogynist vaudeville like “The Real Housewives,” and decent semi-docs like “NYMed.” A series such as “Teen Mom” is exploitative, then revelatory, then exploitative. Neither quality erases the other, and neither trumps.

If you don’t have it in you to watch the hamsters tan, you might prefer to spend August with “The L.A. Complex,” a gem hidden in the CW’s slate of teen shows. Filmed in Toronto, the Canadian series has an outsider’s insight into the panicked strivers of Los Angeles, a demographic that might well audition for “Big Brother.” A closeted hip-hop star, terrified of being outed, beats up his lover; the star of a “Grey’s Anatomy”-type show, at once cocky and needy, is solicited for a “contract” relationship with an older actress. The newest character is a homeless Manitoban teen-ager struggling to get her kid brother a Hollywood break. There are comic plots, too, including one with a wild starlet cast on a Christian soap opera. Now entering its second season, “The L.A. Complex” is maddeningly low-rated, but it’s worth seeking out: it’s no masterpiece of cinematography, and can veer into melodrama, but at its sharpest moments the show has as much “Midnight Cowboy” in it as it does “Melrose Place.” ♦